1. Technical Field
This invention generally relates to data processing, and more specifically relates to storage of data in a database.
2. Background Art
Since the dawn of the computer age, computers have evolved and become more and more powerful. In our present day, computers have become indispensable in many fields of human endeavor including engineering design, machine and process control, information storage and retrieval, and office computing. One of the primary uses of computers is for information storage and retrieval.
Database systems have been developed that allow a computer to store a large amount of information in a way that allows a user to search for and retrieve specific information in the database. For example, an insurance company may have a database that includes all of its policy holders and their current account information, including payment history, premium amount, policy number, policy type, exclusions to coverage, etc. A database system allows the insurance company to retrieve the account information for a single policy holder among the thousands and perhaps millions of policy holders in its database.
Most modern databases support batch processing. Batch processing is a way to compile several database updates into a batch. The batch is then submitted to the database, which processes all updates in the batch. Many Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application servers do not support batch processing. As a result, the batch processing support built into the database often goes unused by the application servers.
A J2EE application server provides a deploy tool that generates code that allows J2EE Container Managed Persistence (CMP) applications to interact with the database. This generated code must be backwards compatible for the same release of the J2EE application server. It would be relatively straightforward to incorporate batch processing into an application server by modifying the generated code to include batch processing support. This step, however, would require redeployment of the generated code, which in turn would required that all applications that access the database to be redeployed. This is an unacceptable requirement for inter-release revisions. When a new release is made, the batch processing support could be incorporated into the generated code, because the new release may requires the applications to be redeployed if they want to take advantage of any of the new features in the release. However, there is currently no known way to enable batch processing without affecting the generated code. Without a way to enable batch processing without affecting generated code, the J2EE application server industry will not be able to take advantage of batch processing until a new release of the J2EE application server software is released.